So after writing the post about how time is money and usually a lot of money, etc etc, I felt kind of guilty for not doing anything about my big credit card. I mean, three hundred bucks! That's a lot of money! And the faster I pay down the debt, the smaller the minimum payment becomes, so if I had a real emergency it wouldn't be a huge burden.
It occurred to me that, hey, I have three credit cards! And they're all always sending me crap in the mail to get me to transfer my balances! So I checked my other Chase card (the one that doesn't have the balance) and lo and behold, they have FIVE different balance transfer options, all at very nice rates (7.99 with no fees, to 0.99 until 2/07) and all done automatically online. Unfortunately I don't think they'd let me transfer one Chase balance onto another.
So I check my MBNA card. This has some charges on it, but I expect to fully pay it off with the DealBarbie & Co. money that I'll get in about three weeks. Holy crap! They have a 0% offer until JUNE 2007. And that's all without having to apply for any new cards or anything like that. And, of course, when that offer expires, I can just transfer it back to the Chase card at a very nice rate! I'll have to get a limit raise on the MBNA card, and check out what the fees are, but this could be super easy.
Of course, now I really want to do it RIGHT NOW. Unfortunately, I know that a) if I ask to have my limit raised now, I'd have to ask for a whole lot extra since I still have charges on there. Which would reduce the likelihood that they'd say yes to the higher limit. And b) you always pay off the lower-rate balance first, so it would be royally stupid to transfer a big balance on at 0% while I still have a smaller one at 9.9%, because then the small one would never get paid off and would accrue interest even faster than the big balance did at 3.9%. So I need to wait until I can pay off the whole card, and THEN ask for the limit raise, and THEN transfer the balance over.
But I wanna do it now! Now now now! I am very impatient. Having thought of such a good idea, I want to put it into practice as soon as possible.
Saturday, August 05, 2006
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4 comments:
You wouldn't happen to have any Citi cards, would you? Because most of them come with a 0% fee-free BT offer that lasts a year and you can just have them either pay off the Chase bill immediately or have them send you a check.
Nope, I just have two Chase cards and an MBNA card. Chase won't let you transfer from one Chase card to another unfortunately.
I can't recall but Chase might just send a check made out to you? A CSR told me that since no company lets you pay off one card with another of their same, so the best thing to do is just get the cash yourself and they never have to know how you spend it.
The online thing asks for your account numbers - I do get balance transfer checks in the mail now and then but haven't gotten any good 0% ones from Chase.
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